Indrani Mukherjea delaying trial claiming Sheena Bora is alive: CBI

One of the grounds on which the Supreme Court granted bail to Indrani Mukherjea is that she has been behind bars for six-andhalf years and the trial is not likely to take long. However, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which probed the case has accused the former media executive of delaying the trial by filing applications.

In November last year, Indrani wrote a letter to the CBI stating that Sheena was alive and living in Srinagar. She claimed that police inspector Asha Korke, who is also lodged at Byculla prison, who had visited Srinagar, informed her of the same.

As she didn’t receive any reply from the CBI, Indrani later filed an application before the special CBI court in December 2021. Korke is in custody in an extortion case of a developer, in which she is a co-accused. Giving details of her conversation with Korke, Indrani has said in her application that Korke approached her in the prison and told her that she had crucial information about her daughter.

Korke is said to have told Indrani that she had suppressed the information since June 2021 and had ‘felt guilty’ about it. The central agency, in its reply to Indrani’s application, had called her claim as ‘cooked up’ and ‘imaginary’ and an attempt to “delay” the trial.

The agency called it ‘next to impossible’ saying Sheena was murdered by strangulating to death. It also said that it is an attempt to supplement her bogus and imaginary defence and has nothing to do with reality.

The CBI had further said that Indrani had filed the application with an intention to delay the disposal of the trial. It also cited the testimony of accusedturned-approver and Indrani’s driver Shyamvar Rai and said she has a prime role in committing the murder of her daughter. The agency also cited the matching of scientific evidence in the form of DNA matches between the remains of the body and that of Indrani. It said that its investigation clearly established that Sheena is dead.

CFSL reports in respect of DNA examination of the femur bone and cervical vertebrae of the recovered body have concluded that Indrani is the biological mother of the DNA of the femur bone and cervical vertebrae, it stated. It further pointed out that the contents of the application before the court are improvised as compared to the letter Indrani had written to its director. It said that in the letter, Sheena’s purported conversation with Korke is not mentioned.

“This clearly shows that the applicant is cooking up stories to benefit herself by misleading the CBI as well as the court,” its stated. Indrani is facing another case related to rioting inside the Byculla prison, along with other inmates, for their demand for an inquiry into Manjula Shetye’s death in 2017.

The women prisons had gone on a rampage following the death of their co-prisoner Shetye allegedly at the hands of the prison staff. They had caused damage to prison property as well as injured six priso

ALSO READ

Sheena Bora murder case: Timeline